Two women, draped in Catalan pro-independence flags, leave a demonstration in Vic, Spain, on Monday, a day after violence marred Catalonia’s referendum vote on independence from Spain.

Photograph by David Ramos / Getty

Voting rights have been under siege in the U.S. in recent years, with charges of attempted electoral interference, legislation that seeks to make access to the polls more difficult, and gerrymandering, in a case that reached the Supreme Court this week. But no citizens here or in any democracy expect that they may be attacked by the police if they try to vote. Yet that is what happened on Sunday in the Spanish region of Catalonia, where thousands of members of the Guardia Civil paramilitary force, and riot police, were deployed by the central government in Madrid to prevent the Catalans from holding an “illegal” referendum on independence from Spain. Masked and helmeted police used pepper spray and knocked people to the ground, kicking and beating some, and dragging others by their hair. Social-media sites quickly filled with images of bloodied and battered voters. Whatever the avowed legality of the action, it was not only a shocking display of official violence employed against mostly peaceful and unarmed civilians but an extraordinary expression of cognitive dissonance: Since when did European governments prevent their citizens from voting?

In a way, Sunday’s events were a chronicle of a disaster foretold. Secessionist sentiments have been building for some time in Catalonia, an ancient principality, then part of the Crown of Aragon, that was annexed by the Bourbon kings in the War of Spanish Succession, and which has since held on-and-off-again autonomy. Under General Francisco Franco, who ran Spain as a Fascist dictatorship from 1939 until 1975, Catalonia’s autonomy was suppressed, and the Catalan language was outlawed. (The region was also the site of one of the last stands of the Republic in Spain’s brutal civil war, and Catalans paid a heavy price for their resistance: thousands were imprisoned and executed after Franco’s forces defeated the Republicans.)*

During the country’s transition to democracy, in the late seventies and early eighties, Catalonia was once again granted autonomous status, along with other Spanish regions, but in the past few years the idea of independent nationhood has captivated a large number of its people. The nationalist mood has been exacerbated by dissatisfaction with Catalonia’s share of the national budget: a region with a population of seven and a half million people, and Barcelona as its capital, Catalonia is Spain’s economic powerhouse, producing about a fifth of the country’s G.D.P. and paying a significant amount of tax. The decision, in 2010, by Spain’s constitutional court to deprive Catalonia of its previously granted designation as a “nation” within the constitutional monarchy was, for many Catalans, the turning point. The Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, a veteran of the Partido Popular, a party founded by Franco’s political disciples, who was elected in 2011, has repeatedly called the independence campaign “illegal,” “unconstitutional,” and even an attempted “coup d’état.” His primary Catalan nemesis is Carles Puigdemont, a former journalist who became the regional President last year and has long been an adherent of independence; he recently said that there is “nothing” that the Spanish state can do to deter him from the campaign—including putting him in prison.

In a previous, nonbinding referendum on independence, held in 2014, 2.3 million Catalans voted, and an estimated ninety-two per cent supported the idea. But with only a minority of the population participating, the result was inconclusive. Undeterred, the Catalan parliament approved a plan for secession, by a narrow majority, the following year. Spain’s constitutional court ruled against it, but Catalonia’s government, now committed to independence, declared its determination to proceed.

And proceed it did, on Sunday. Voters were asked a single question: “Do you want Catalonia to become an independent state in the form of a republic?” According to Catalan authorities, in spite of the police intervention, the confiscation of ballot boxes, and the closure of some polling centers beforehand, more than two million Catalans voted, and an estimated ninety per cent—but just forty-two per cent of the electorate—answered yes.

On Sunday night, Rajoy spoke on national television and, in an address of vintage Iberian obtuseness, lauded the events of the day. He celebrated the fact that Spain’s “rule of law” had prevailed, and thanked the security forces for their actions. He described the referendum as having represented a “serious attack” on Spain’s democracy that had to be stopped. The phrase he actually used was “one could not look away.” Rajoy did not mention the people who had been injured—there were nearly nine hundred, including two who were seriously hurt, a man who lost an eye to a rubber bullet, and a number of women who accused policemen of having sexually molested them. (About a dozen police officers were injured.)

While there was a generally shocked public reaction to the violence, many non-Catalan Spaniards have either defended the police action as legal, following Rajoy’s justifications, or else lamented the police “clumsiness,” but blamed the Catalans for bringing the situation about in the first place. Amnesty International, meanwhile, has lambasted Rajoy’s government for having used “excessive and disproportionate” force. There has been an unusually muted response from the other countries in the European Union, where authorities are worried, in the age of Brexit, about any further fragmentation taking place, and have warned Catalonia’s leaders that, if they chose to secede from Spain, they would not be accepted into the E.U. Employing consummate diplomatese, the President of the E.U., Donald Tusk, said that he had spoken with Rajoy and that, while he “shared his constitutional arguments, I appealed to him to find ways to avoid escalations and use of force.”

Clearly interpreting Rajoy’s heavy-handedness as a boon to the independence movement, Puigdemont said, “On this day of hope and suffering, Catalonia’s citizens have earned the right to an independent state in the form of a republic.” On Tuesday, the trade unions called a general strike across Catalonia, which was joined by university students and the world-renowned Barcelona football club. In an op-ed published in the Guardian, the political scientist Víctor Lapuente Giné wrote that “Rajoy’s move could not have been more counterproductive. The political-bureaucratic elite that controls the ruling conservative Partido Popular . . . has failed to understand that a modern state depends not on the monopoly of violence, but on the monopoly of legitimacy.” Giné added a gloomy prediction: “It’s unlikely that Catalan separatism will propel similar secessionist challenges. No other separatist movement, apart from that of Scotland, has the popular and organisational support. Yet it’s likely that Spain’s internal turmoil will escalate, triggering an international crisis by forcing major diplomatic players to take sides. We are far from the incendiary secessionist tensions of former communist countries, from the Balkans to Ukraine. But we are moving in that direction.” In an interview with me on Wednesday afternoon, Raül Romeva, the Catalan foreign minister, seemed to confirm that outlook. “After many years of peaceful demonstrations and requests from many people to seek a resolution to the Catalan issues,” he said, “we finally went to a referendum to decide things, only to be confronted with violence. Since Sunday, many Catalans feel as if they have been expelled from the Spanish state, which no longer represents the interests of all its citizens.”

On Tuesday night, King Felipe VI made a rare televised address to the nation, in which he criticized the Catalan authorities for having shown what he called an “inadmissible disloyalty to the state” by pushing an agenda that had “fractured the nation” and “divided the Catalan people.” History suddenly seems alive again in Spain, and it is perhaps worth remembering that it was Catalonia’s support for a Habsburg king that brought about its loss of independence, during the War of Succession, in which the Bourbons—Felipe’s forebears—became Spain’s monarchs.

Within hours of the King’s speech, Puigdemont gave an interview in which he said that Catalans had earned the right to their independence and that their government would issue a “uniliteral declaration of independence” within days. But late Wednesday he addressed the Catalans in a speech that felt more conciliatory than confrontational, calling for “negotiation” and “dialogue,” exactly what has been lacking in the dispute so far.

*This piece has been updated with a slightly modified account of Catalonia’s
history.